This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine.

It's a scary thing to be responsible for the redesign of a magazine, especially one that's more than 20 years old. You have to get comfortable with the fact that you're bound to inadvertently piss off a few fans. But I've worked on the magazine since 2008, and after being editor-in-chief for about a year now, it seemed the right time for me and my team to take a break and rethink the format and editorial direction.

Our magazine tends to be more news-heavy, which I love, but we wanted to strike a better balance when it comes to including cultural coverage. So now in our new "Briefs" section, you'll see recurring pieces, including profiles of cultural figures, like Hannibal Buress, and travel stories about places you'd actually want to visit, like a unique Day of the Dead festival in the mountains in Guatemala.

We also wanted to innovate with graphic- and photo-heavy pieces that use visuals to tell stories in new ways. To that end, we've given VICE News senior investigative reporter Jason Leopold two pages each month to decipher classified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. For the first installment, Leopold uses his magic to explain the secrets behind the US government's trade of Taliban members for US soldier Bowe Bergdahl.

For the back of the magazine, we've also introduced a new section called "Field Notes," in which we've carved out a space for commentary, ephemera, and behind-the-scenes looks at the making of the entire VICE universe. "Field Notes" is all about the identities of our contributors and their thoughts on the world, so in this section, expect to find writing on economics, sex, and the internet age. We have columns by our digital channels as well, like VICELAND's Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu on the politics of weed and Motherboard's take on the future.

And then there are our longform investigative features and photo portfolios—our bread and butter. We gave these an updated look and feel, introducing a new restrained design, so the stories can speak for themselves. In this issue, journalist Jacob Kushner travels to Kenya to investigate the unexpected refugee crisis created after neighboring Uganda passed its notorious anti-gay law in 2014. We also have an exclusive new look at photos from an upcoming issue of Toilet Paper magazine, by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari (they're also the geniuses behind this issue's cover image).

It's been two and a half months of late nights at the office and daily freak-outs, but I'm thrilled to finally be able to share our newly redesigned magazine with you. Here are some more highlights:

-Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards talks about reproductive rights, sex education, and the Supreme Court

-An exclusive first look at Daniel Clowes's beautiful new graphic novel Patience

-Jean Friedman-Rudovsky heads to Thailand to profile Empower, a union of 50,000 sex workers fighting for rights in Thailand

-Photographer Jan Hoek snaps surreal images of Cape Town's transgender sex worker community

-The story of the mysterious and unsolved death of a Mexican migrant in a private, for-profit Arizona detention facility

-Photographer Kent Andreasen takes photos of the forgotten diamond mining towns sprawled up the west coast of South Africa and the people who live there now

A mural of Kim Il-sung outside a North Korean hotel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Read: We Asked an Expert if the World Needs to Worry About North Korea's H-Bomb Claims

In an hour-long trial Wednesday, North Korea's highest court sentenced a college student from the University of Virginia to 15 years hard labor for trying to steal a propaganda poster from his Pyongyang hotel, as the Associated Press reports.

The defendant, 21-year-old Otto Warmbier, apparently went over to North Korea as part of a tour group, and he was detained on January 2 while boarding his flight home to the states. When North Korean officials searched him, they allegedly found a propaganda poster torn from his hotel room wall.

North Korean officials reportedly believe a shady university group and the CIA encouraged Warmbier to steal the poster from the hotel. He, on the other hand, maintains he jacked the propaganda poster for a church member back home in Ohio, who promised to trade him a $10,000 used car for the souvenir.

As the New York Times reports, Warmbier confessed and pleaded for his release February—an apology that has to be taken with a grain of salt given past claims of coerced confessions in North Korea. But if the sentencing goes through, the guy won't be back on US soil until he's at least 36.

"I made the worst mistake of my life," Warmbier said late last month.

This is totally normal beach behavior. Probably.

The Dead or Alive series is famous, or rather infamous, for its amply proportioned and scantily clad starring ladies. The franchise's most recent entry, 2015's one-on-one fighter Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, is no exception. There are hundreds of downloadable costumes available for the game, and while some are fun, like Jann Lee's dragon outfit, the vast majority of them are incredibly skimpy bikinis for the game's female cast. Male characters only get a few paltry outfits thrown their way, none of which are likely to invoke a dreamy sigh or—shudder—cramped wrists. Female outfits dominate the DLC, despite the roster of fighters only being split 60/40 in favor of the girls.

But on Valentine's Day 2016, everyone in the game received some new, (some might say) sexy outfits. The ladies were provided with summer dresses all of, let's say, an inch longer than your average T-shirt, while the chaps could select from an array of tight-fitting shorts and swimming trunks. But before we all high-five one another and declare this a victory in the continuing battle against overt sexism in video games, take a closer look at the character Bayman in his newly acquired smalls. Look at his package. Go on, it won't hurt you.

Now, I'm no licensed doctor, but our friend Bayman here seems to have a severe case of what can only be called "micro penis"—and he's not alone. The entire male cast of Dead or Alive 5: Last Round all suffer from Ken Doll syndrome to varying degrees. The guys wearing shorts have a bit more of a pronounced bulge down there, but even they can't be happy with the gifts God gave them. While it's funny to point and laugh at the ridiculous proportions that the men have been given in Last Round, it's a sign of a rather endemic problem in the video games industry at large: The brazen sexualization of women remains acceptable in some backward quarters, not least at Dead or Alive studio Team Ninja, a subsidiary of Koei Tecmo, but the sexualization of men is still taboo.

Dead or Alive has always been sold as a game where sex takes precedence over substance, which is a shame because its fighting titles are more than acceptable contenders in the genre, and very accessible to newcomers, too. But I'm not here to denounce Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo for their fixation on the female form. If you asked a hundred straight guys what their favorite things in the world were, boobies and video games would most likely take the top two spots on the Family Fortunes board, so you can understand why developers would want to push that angle. It doesn't make it right, but if they're servicing an audience's wants, so be it.

But what about the millions of women who play video games? You know, the other sex that makes up at least half of the gaming population, maybe even more according to some studies. What about gay men? If studios are happy to titillate, then why aren't they respecting the needs of everyone but heterosexual dudes? What if you really couldn't care less about boobs? Basically: Where are all the dongs?

I can already hear the mashing of keyboards as people rattle off their prepared responses: Girls don't play Dead or Alive, so the developers would be wasting their time. And sure, the audience for DoA games would likely swing massively in favor of straight men who want to see boobs jiggling about. But isn't that kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy? By making it so Dead or Alive only caters to one section of a much larger demographic, Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo are cutting themselves off from almost the entire female audience, along with any fellas who'd like to see a bit of dick in their games.

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Related: Watch 'Confessions of a Bartender'

Here comes practiced retort number two: Women don't want that kind of game, because they aren't as "perverted" as men. Fuck off they aren't. Check the box office numbers for Magic Mike, a film that grossed over $167,000,000 worldwide and that had an audience who was 73 percent female. And it didn't even have Channing Tatum getting his tackle out; all cinema-goers saw was his bare backside. Women want to see sex on the screen just as much as men do, and it's time we dropped this out-dated idea of innocent little girls that simply can't handle seeing a cock, whether that be on TV, in films, or in video games.

Team Ninja certainly isn't paying attention. The next game in its DoA beach volleyball spin-off series, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, is coming out in Japan on March 24, and it features an entirely female cast of playable characters. Playable characters that look like this.

There's knowing sexualization, and then there's outright shamelessness, and it's debatable where Xtreme 3 falls on that scale. Why are there no men playing alongside these busty avatars? Evidently, the game's makers have never watched Top Gun, and they assume guys absolutely hate beach volleyball and larking about by swimming pools.

Extra game options and features in Xtreme 3 include "Butt Battle" mode and wardrobe malfunctions for the PlayStation 4 version. It's fan service of the highest order, and I wouldn't be surprised if pre-orders came with a box of Kleenex—but I personally have no problem with any of this. My issue is that Koei could so easily have avoided accusations that their games are rampantly sexist by throwing a few of the DoA series' hunkier men into Xtreme 3. Let the dudes complete with their bulging packages on show; have them throw down in the Butt Battles. Instead, rather than understand the growing need for this sort of representative balance in the medium, Xtreme 3's makers are taking their ball and going home—they're not even officially releasing the game in the West, instead restricting it mostly to the Japanese market, where this kind of nonsense still gets a free pass. (Just look at Senran Kagura. Or, better, don't.)

It's not like adding male characters would be a ton of extra work for the developers, either. Team Ninja can't shut up about their fantastic Soft Engine 2.0, which accurately replicates the squidgy areas of human anatomy—by which they of course mean boobs and bums. But there is absolutely no reason you couldn't apply the same technology to a big floppy cock stuffed inside some Budgy Smugglers. It's not like Zack or Leon are going to be stepping onto the sandy court with massive boners, so the Soft Engine should suffice. And if not, then who knows: Maybe the powers that be can develop the Hard Engine, too?

It's too late for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 to change now, but maybe there's hope for future series titles to offer a little equal-opportunity lechery. Join us in the 21st century, Koei Tecmo. We still have big bouncy boobies and skimpy lingerie, and nobody is going to take those away from you. But we also have swinging dicks and bouncing balls, and it's high time you stopped being so embarrassed about them.

Follow Ian on Twitter.

More than half of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal in the United States, according to a Gallup poll from October 2015. With 58 percent in favor, legalization is enjoying the highest support ever reported (up from 34 percent in 2001). Still, draconian sentencing laws surrounding marijuana have led to the imprisonment of millions of American citizens, many of whom are still serving time for possessing small amounts of weed for personal use.

One of those citizens is Bernard Noble, a father and aspiring restaurateur from New Orleans who was stopped by police and nabbed for possession of two joints in 2010. In keeping with Louisiana's habitual offenders law, Noble, who had two prior cocaine possession charges and a prior marijuana possession charge (he admits that he was a coke addict in the 90s), was sentenced to a staggering 13 and 1/3 years in prison for simple marijuana possession, a nonviolent offense.

In tracing Noble's story for this week's episode of Weediquette on VICELAND, I saw how a system of justice that's discriminatory to African-Americans at the moment of arrest, overly aggressive in its prosecution, and inhumane and profit-driven in its practices of incarceration can result in truly illogical outcomes.

People are getting rich from legal weed in Colorado, a development that's spurring business and generating tax revenue (and a topic that I'll be exploring in future episodes), but in states like Louisiana, weed is still a tool of the incestuous political economic machine of mass incarceration.

For Noble, there's some hope. Louisiana has a new governor who might be more inclined to grant him clemency. If you watch this piece and think Noble has done enough time in prison, please consider using the hashtag #freebernardnoble, and dropping Governor John Bel Edwards a line. He can be reached by phone at 866-366-1121 or via email here.

Give the third episode of WEEDIQUETTE a watch above and stay tuned for new episodes airing on VICELAND Tuesdays at 11 PM.

"The Means of Pleasure" by Roy Martinez

"Lick Ass" is not your typical brand name, but it's the English translation for Lambe Culo, the alias for genderfluid visual artist and fashion designer Roy Martinez. In Martinez's artwork, clothing designs reclaim old school cultural terms like "Brown Pride," lucha libre masks substitute gimp masks in BDSM-inspired photoshoots, and harness sculptures are made with the traditional patterns of the Mexican serape.

The queer, punk, and Chicano cultures are intrinsic influences to Lambe Culo's work, even though they may seem to have irreconcilable differences. Traditional Mexican-American families tend to employ strict gender roles and conservative values, so being queer and Chicano can be complicated. But instead of rejecting Chicano identity, Lambe Culo finds inspiration in it and navigates these tricky aspects through art. "I want to evoke the complexity of my being. I don't just want to do abstract expressionistic stuff. I also want to reference Mesoamerican and indigenous influences because that's just as important as my color theory. Part of being queer is not being set on one thing," Martinez said.

Originally from Chicago and Texas with roots in Zacatecas, Mexico, Lambe Culo is now in LA finishing up a studio art degree at Cal Arts while maintaining social media celebrity. Lambe Culo's images on Instagram and Tumblr are often sexually provocative, challenging respectability politics at all turns. Unsurprisingly, Martinez's bathtub nudes and simulated cum pics have been censored by Instagram.

I had a chance to talk with Lambe Culo about sketching Selena outfits, growing up Chicana in Texas, and using art as a means to analyze the fluidity of gender and cultural identities.

"Homage to Céasar Chávex" by Roy Martinez

Why Lambe Culo?
At first it was a joke. I showed my mentor Harry Gamboa Jr., from ASCO [a Chicano art group from the 1960s], a picture of the label Lambe Culo, and he told me I should use it as my brand. It's very abrupt and in your face, and it's resistant to traditional brand names. For me, it rolls off my tongue.

When you explain it to white people, it's like, "Oh it's 'lick ass.' It's not a typical brand name." When you brand something, it has to be respectful and thought out and not very ratchet or punk. I'm really into punk, so that's why I did it. Also being queer and brown is in a way being punk.

I fangirled when I saw you at the C'mon Everybody bar in Brooklyn. How does it feel to meet people from the internet who know your internet persona?
When I went to Mexico, I crashed with a friend from Instagram. We went out, and I think he thought I was going to be out there, like drinking and out of control. It was my first time in Mexico City, and I was shy and very aware of my surroundings. Being queer and non-binary, I have to be cautious of my surroundings. He was like, "What's wrong?" I think he had a vision of me that didn't relate to the real me.

Your social media image is very punk, intense, sexually overt, but in real life, you're so approachable. I think these dualities such as shy boi and hard femme also reflect in your artwork and fashion design.
I find the virtual world to be a safe space. I can be who I am without any restraints or confinements. I can be free in that realm, but in real life, you have other constraints. There are weird people in the world out to destroy you. If you're not conforming to their binaries, it's like you're meant to be destructed.

WATCH: "The Subway Gangs of Mexico City"

Some of the clothes that you make have culturally specific identifier words on them—Xicanx, Cabroncita, Brown Pride. Is there a larger reason for using these words in your clothing line?
I think part of it is to push an identity forward. I do borrow from old school Chicano aesthetics. While I want to push an identity forward, I also want to rethink it. There are people who are straight or hetero or cis that relate to my work because of Chicano 60s and 70s movimiento (movement) shit. Then there are these new wave queer Chicano/as who also relate to it.

I don't think many people outside of California and Texas understand the term Chicano, much less Xicanx or Latinx. Can you give me your rundown on the x-ing out of gendered words?
The word Xicanx is open for interpretation. It has room to move. It's very inclusive for anybody that relates to it. A lot of people are like 'Oh you weren't born in Mexico, so these identifiers exclude you... ' I feel like Xicanx is inclusive to anyone who identifies with it. I'm not an identity politics enforcer. But for me, in general, Xicanx is not being bound to the feminine or masculine aspects. I'm very fluid within myself. I accept both masculinity and femininity equally. It's a word that is new and is still getting meaning. People can interpret it how they feel like. It's not a set thing. I feel like being bound to that is not what Xicanx is. It's fluidity.

Why do you use pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican images as ancestral references in your work?
For me, it's empowerment—it's digging up what came before me. You can't move forward without knowing what your past is. It's like, Wow, my people fucking built pyramids. Someone did this without modern machinery. For me, that's why I invoke it—to feel more empowered by my culture or who I am. Assimilation has erased all that. In high school, I didn't know what Mexican really was, what Olmec, Aztec, Mayan, and Mesoamerican identities were. I had to do my own research. It was nothing that I was taught.

"Sin Tìtulo" by Roy Martinez

I remember seeing the Chicana punk Alice Bag's book in your studio. Has she influenced you? Who else are your influencers?
Again, because I wasn't brought up knowing anything about my identity, I've had to research. Alice Bag, a Chicana in the 70s who was in the punk movement, just came up recently. When it comes to punk culture, white cis males are known as the punk innovators or originators. So to see Alice Bag who claims her Chicanidad (Chicano culture) is awesome. Like, "I'm Chicana, and I'm fucking punk!" It was amazing to find her out. Also, the Chicana writers Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldúa definitely.

I love your conceptual Selena GIFs! What does Selena mean to you?
Selena means childhood. I remember when I was 10 or 11, I was sketching her outfits. I don't know if I was inspired by her music, fashion, or by her being a fashion designer. I guess I saw a little bit of myself in her. Being Chicana, being Mexican-American, being Tejana is a connection to her.

T-shirt for sale on lambeculo.bigcartel.com

How does the BDSM imagery (harnesses, chokers, chains, etc.) function within your work?
People automatically associate that work with gay leather-daddy culture, which, yes, I can see that. But, for me, it represents a willful restraint. Especially when I did the harness sculpture with the serape. That represented culture. Yes, I love culture so much, but I'm not able to be who I truly am within my culture sometimes. It's a metaphor for me, for how I feel.

There's some shit within our culture that is shitty. It's very complex. That's why I identify with Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands. She puts it into words so perfectly. When I first read her, I was getting chills and crying. There's a passage where she says she feels mariada (dizzy) from pulling in and out of different cultures. It's part of survival to go in and out of these different cultures.

WATCH: The Zapatista Uprising (20 Years Later)

I read that you want to eventually have an art history class based around people of color?
Yes, that's why I want to get my Master's to be able to make courses that were not available to me. They only have one Chicana feminism class here that they offer once a year. There's no other Chicano/a course that they offer at all. And that class was very valuable to me. It gave me terminology that I didn't know existed, words I could relate to my practice. When I learned about terms like "rasquache" and "domesticana," I was like that's definitely what my art is. Rasquache is doing with what you have. Domesticana is using what you have around the house, which is totally inspired by my mom.

Do you feel your art is rebelling against everything at once—overwhelmingly white art institutions, homophobic society at large, and traditional and conservative values of the Chicano/Mexicano culture? We also have to admit that, within our culture, there is a lot of misogyny, homophobia, anti-blackness.
Yes. It's kind of overwhelming to think that I have all these things on my back. There are days where I just want to be me. Like this is really heavy, but that's where art comes in—where I can have that freedom to express myself without any constraints.

Purchase Lambe Culo gear.

Visit Barbara's website .

Yeah, I could fix this bridge, but that does sound like a lot of effort.

On my second day in town I'm invited to check out the local saloon. A beer costs 80 percent of all the money I have in the world. I laugh. Isn't cheaper booze supposed to be the main perk of moving away from your dead-end job in the city?

I worry, too, about the content of conversation I'd have with any of the patrons. "You're the new boy in town, right? You've just moved into the old farm, haven't you? How are your crops coming in?"

"Oh, I've barely done anything yet," I'd say, evasively. "Y'know, just settling in at the minute. Lot of unpacking to do!" I'm terrified. Let's say I bring someone home. It takes just one look in the field outside to know I've completely mugged off the whole point of being here.

Stardew Valley is an independently developed farming-life game, a Harvest Moon for what people in suits are going to call the "Minecraft Generation." This PC-only release has seen nearly half a million sales, well within a month of its launch at the end of February. Over 12,000 people are watching streams of it on Twitch at the time of writing. For comparison, only half that number is watching the high-def version of Battle Royale that is The Culling, released a week later. Basically, Stardew Valley is a Big Deal.

Um, okay.

In theory, players are supposed to spend their time in the game farming and watering crops, talking to the townsfolk, figuratively and literally planting roots in the community. Stardew Valley has a growing reputation that, although it contains a multitude of side activities, it's never necessary to do anything that doesn't catch your attention. Don't want to go adventuring down in the titular valley's mines? Don't like fishing? That's totally fine: you make your own fun.

And my fun involved deciding against the farming part of this farming game. Yeah, it's the core of the game's content, but I just didn't fancy it. If Stardew Valley supposedly offers an escapist fantasy of living rent-free in a cottage, out in the country, in a property bequeathed to you by a passing relative, the last thing I'd want to do in that dream scenario is work hard and toil away in a field. In fact, as the game contains an energy gauge, an exhaustion level, that depletes whenever the character being controlled performs a strenuous activity, I figured I'd attempt to play Stardew Valley as the most unfettered person who's ever lived. You grab a hoe; I'll be playing the role of a lad on a course of prescription-grade chillaxatives.

Still, I figured I needed to have goals nonetheless. I wanted to have an active social life, which I would want for real if I had the benefit of time and no bills. Making friends in Stardew Valley involves talking to people in town and giving them gifts, interactions made difficult without a regular source of income or tradable goods.

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The three methods available to me for presents were as follows: picking up stuff already growing out of the ground; completing the few errands I was able to for a cash reward, then exchanging that at the local store for something physical; and going through people's trash cans to grab whatever usable "rubbish" they'd thrown out. Jumping into bins is unrestricted, but results in a disgusted reaction from anyone who sees it happening. I wasn't looking to get that kind of reputation. I performed these heists like I was stealing from the till at my day job, which is of course something I absolutely don't do.

My days meant drifting around town looking for flowers and checking the beach for the occasional nice shell. I got lucky once, finding a massive patch of wild-growing spring onions. I wandered the town handing out some to anyone I passed. Turns out that very few people are interested in a fresh face with their hands full of scallions.

What, so you can rip me off with your hiked-up bar prices? No thanks, Emily.

I seemed to get on best with Linus, an older guy living in a tent north of town. I gave him a flower any time I saw him. He seemed really happy about whatever I handed over. I liked him immediately; he appreciated the gift I'm giving them as a symbol of our friendship, rather than it needing to have any practical purpose. Coming back to the spring onion thing for a second: has nobody else in this town made an omelette? Or a stir-fry? There's no way either one of the two easiest meals you'll ever make won't benefit from the inclusion of a spring onion. If this feature gets any comments, I want them all to be about your opinions on this matter, and this matter alone.

Anyway, I eventually needed some money—I wanted a larger backpack. I couldn't possibly bring myself to cut down any trees, meaning I couldn't easily get enough wood to make a chest for keeping all my things in. I had to carry all of my unused tools around as dead weight, limiting the amount of other things that I could lug around. This meant that one some days, rainy ones where I didn't easily run into anybody, I had to sell potential gifts, just to make room. The backpack cost 2000 gold coins. Saving that amount took nine days of prowling around, grabbing literally everything I could that could earn me a few coins.

On Motherboard: Every Steam Game Will Be Playable Through VR

Maybe it's just superstition, but because Stardew Valley lets you check your fortune for the day on the TV, I started chucking that into my daily routine like it was The Jeremy Kyle Show and I was a freelance video game writer. On days where bad luck was prophesied, I really did find fewer things out in the world. As it's only possible to give gifts to people twice a week, once that was done I started just going back to bed immediately on unlucky days, to wait until the week started again.

I suppose that is a sweet camera.

Despite being something of a shut-in, I think my character has inadvertently become incredibly cool. Imagine meeting someone who spends his days picking wildflowers to sell, his only source of income, but he'd gladly hand them out as a gift to anyone who'd like them. He's also incredibly superstitious and sometimes doesn't leave the house all day. You'd probably have a great time hanging out with that guy, if you were sat with them at a wedding. Probably.

Not farming has limited my interaction with this game's world severely but, also and unexpectedly, quite wonderfully, too. Stardew Valley is still entertaining to me in much the same way that a lot of other slow-paced slices of life are. My favorite game that I've played this year is The Long Dark, which is about fending off death in a Canadian winter by scavenging whatever you can. My version of Stardew Valley is sort of the absolute opposite to that situation. I had worried that it might skew overly capitalist, and just be a game about trying to minimize your efforts and maximize your profit margin over all else. But I think there's something here regardless of your interest level in ruling through the early days of an agricultural MegaCorp. So if you don't want to farm, go ahead—with hundreds of thousands of other players pulling up cauliflowers and parsnips anyway, it's not like the people of Stardew are going unfed.

Follow Mathew Jones on Twitter.

A lithograph depicting the anti-Catholic riots that hit Philadelphia in 1844. In the mid 19th century, xenophobic political parties and mobs often targeted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy. Image via public domain

One day not too long ago, more than 10,000 people packed themselves into a Detroit convention center to hear the most controversial politician in America speak. Some were there to shout him down, more were there to celebrate him, and the two factions boiled over with anger and joy before he even took the stage. A scuffle broke out, a cop was seen screaming about having been blinded by some kind of chemical spray, and mocking chants of "Sieg Heil!" could be heard. Eventually, the speaker had to cut his remarks short, his speech subsumed by the chaos he was by then in the habit of causing.

Earlier that day, in Oklahoma, the same candidate had inveighed against the protesters who followed him around the country. "We're going to grab some of these college students by the hair of your head and stick you under the jail."

Those could be vignettes from Donald Trump's campaign as it rolls, seemingly unstoppably now, toward the Republican nomination. The GOP frontrunner's Chicago rally on Friday was canceled amid mass protests, then turned into a brawl; an earlier event in St. Louis led to dozens of arrests of anti-Trump activists. But those scenes of unrest in Detroit and Oklahoma come from George Wallace rallies held in October 1968, where the avowed champion of racial segregation was stoking the same sorts of flames Trump is playing with today. Trump, like Wallace, speaks to the fears and anxieties of working-class whites, the sense that their world is slipping away.

Also like Wallace, Trump makes vague—and sometimes not so vague—threats of violence against those who oppose him. On Wednesday morning, after yet another night of primary victories, Trump was asked what would happen if the Republican elite made good on plans to stop him from getting the nomination at the party convention by any means necessary. "I think you'd have riots," he replied. "I'm representing many, many millions of people."

But Wallace and Trump aren't aberrations. There is a long American tradition of violence in the service of politics—and especially violence sparked by racial and ethnic tension.

"The worst political violence in US history has often been racialized," explains Christopher Strain, a professor of American studies at Florida Atlantic University and the author of Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life. "And there are shades of this strain of violence at the recent Trump rally in Chicago."

In the early days of the American republic, settling partisan disputes by way of fists, knives, clubs, or guns was relatively common. Prominent politicians—like Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and, a few decades later, Andrew Jackson—were almost as notorious for their pistol duels as their politics. Then there was the infamous May 1856 incident where South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks strode onto the floor of the Senate and beat abolitionist Republican Charles Sumner furiously about the neck and face with a cane, nearly killing him.

Violence used to be a more common feature of American life, and campaign events reflected that, according to Noah Feldman, a Harvard legal historian. "They were definitely extremely raucous and that was true of a whole range of public events," he says. "Not just campaign rallies, but the elections themselves were raucous and unruly. All of politics was just much, much wilder."

The mid 19th century saw a spike in populist violence. In the 1840s and 50s, as anti-immigrant sentiment rose, riots tore through cities such as Philadelphia, Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Baltimore; members of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party launched attacks on Catholics in Maine; and Chicago's Know-Nothing mayor essentially went to war with the city's German and Irish immigrants. The Civil War only further inflamed racial tensions. In New York City at the time, Feldman says, "whites—mostly Irish-Americans—rioted and killed blacks on the theory that, you know, 'We're going to have to go to war over you, so let's kill you.' I mean, it's pretty crazy stuff and profoundly irrational but also a feature of American public life at the time."

But it was during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War that wholesale racial terrorism began to take hold on a mass scale. After a bitterly contested Louisiana gubernatorial election, as many as 100 black state militiamen holding a local courthouse in the town of Colfax were killed by a band of enraged paramilitary troops called the White League on Easter Sunday 1873. (Three whites were ultimately convicted of federal crimes over the incident but won a reprieve when the Supreme Court ruled state courts would have to deal with the massacre perpetrators.)

"To become civil is hard; to become uncivil is easy."
—Noah Feldman

Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid, of course, has been defined by the sort of flagrant appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment with which the Know-Nothings would have been quite familiar. In the worldview he's expressed over and over again in stump speeches and on the campaign trail, brown people (Mexicans and Muslims) are responsible for the problems facing working-class whites. Trump has also repeatedly and explicitly (if somewhat flippantly) encouraged attacks on protesters. Combine that rhetoric with angry opposition from left-wing groups such as Black Lives Matter, and you've got the makings of the type of storm not seen in America since the days of Wallace.

"Maintaining civility in public discourse is a delicate thing," says Feldman. "I don't fear that we're in danger of becoming Weimar Germany, with a battle for control over the streets. But that said, civility is a hard-won practice. To become civil is hard; to become uncivil is easy."

A case in point is that of 78-year-old John McGraw. He's the white Trump supporter who sucker-punched a black protester being led out of an event in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by security personnel early last week. (Trump has suggested he may pay legal fees for McGraw, who was arrested the next day and charged with assault and disorderly conduct. Local law enforcement reportedly mulled incitement charges against the candidate himself but declined to proceed.)

Where Trump differs from his predecessors is he has a not insignificant chance of actually becoming president. In 1968, Wallace was a third-party candidate with mostly regional appeal; in the 1850s, the Know-Nothings never got a sniff of the White House and faded quickly. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, might be an underdog against Hillary Clinton in the general election, but he's got a shot, and that scares the hell out of people who oppose him.

"His tactics are on a continuum with we've seen some presidents and candidates do before, but they seem much more extreme because they're not even rationalized as safety measures," says Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It's sort of a disregard of the protesters' rights. And right now, he's a private citizen—he's not yet the government acting, so he doesn't need to respect those rights. But it does make me wonder what his administration, if that occurred, would do when they were obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of protesters."

Trump's rhetoric has spooked plenty of people, both on the left and the right, but America has seen this sort of anger before and come out on the other side intact. What it hasn't seen is what happens when that sort of demagogue actually gets handed the keys to the country.

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Look at Simon's Instagram and buy his new book from Fantagraphics.

Donald Trump at Regent University in Virginia Beach on February 24. AP Photo/Steve Helber

Read: A Hand Model Casting Agent Told Us Donald Trump's Hands Are 'Childlike' and 'Severely Weatherbeaten'

On Wednesday, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump told Fox News that he wouldn't be attending next week's Republican debate, which prompted John Kasich to pull out as well. Cruz could probably debate himself on stage, but Fox decided no one wanted to see that, so the debate is officially canceled.

Trump, who's giving a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) the same night as the debate, told Fox he thought the CNN debate in Miami was the last of the GOP debates, and no one let him know there would be another.

"I will say this. I think we've had enough debates. We've had eleven or twelve debates. I did really well on the last one. I think I've done well in all the debates," Trump told Fox & Friends. "How many times can the same people ask you the same question?... Nobody told me about it. And I won't be there, no."

Trump insisted that he "doesn't mind" debating, but the AIPAC speech is just more important.

'Yer done bud!': a distinctly Albertan slogan. Photos via Dawson Raymond

Dawson Raymond has many names for adult men who troll for underage girls and boys on the internet. "Sick fucks," "fucking pigs," and "rapist douche motherfuckers" are just a few examples I hear over the phone.

A mason worker living in Calgary with three pit bulls, Raymond occasionally apologizes for becoming "overheated." Just thinking about child predators, it seems, never ceases to make his blood boil.

But Raymond assures me he takes a cooler approach when posing as a 13-year-old girl on popular dating sites. As the ringleader of a growing team of vigilante pedophile hunters, he wants to make sure "nobody does anything stupid."

"We're not trying to set people up," he says of the To Catch a Predator tactic. "We don't ask anybody to meet us... we wait for them to talk to us."

With this strategy, Raymond says it doesn't take long to find men sending unsolicited pictures, asking about sex, and even inviting supposed minors to meet IRL. "I'm telling you, the first time it took me ten fucking minutes, and I had like 20 of them talking to me," he says. "I figured it would get harder, but it's hasn't."

In September of last year, Raymond started confronting these men at malls and fast food joints with cameras rolling, later posting the videos and chat logs online. Between his Facebook page and branded "creep catchers" website, the videos can rack up thousands of shares and hundreds of thousands of views. As you can imagine, the project is a polarizing one. Some commenters tell Raymond and his team to let police do the "big boy job," while others call him a national hero.

Dawson Raymond.

He says he learned the technique from watching Justin Payne, a Mississauga-based vigilante who has confronted more than 150 alleged predators. But it's Raymond that has brought an entrepreneurial spirit to that cause, helping start up chapters in Victoria, Nanaimo, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Lloydminster, Saskatoon, and soon, Regina.

Calgary police are familiar with Raymond's work. Media have asked them for reaction enough times that I'm sent a prepared unattributed statement: "The Calgary Police Service is aware of the incidents that have been alleged by Mr. Raymond and is actively investigating these complaints," it reads. "The Service in no way advocates a citizen taking police action into their own hands and conducting their own investigations."

The statement goes on to say pedophile hunting is dangerous and puts both vigilantes and their loved ones at risk—something Raymond readily admits. He knows that some of his targets will try to retaliate, and he makes sure his fellow team members are prepared for the same.

"I'm making sure they're soldiers," says Raymond of his vetting process. "I'm not just bringing on any flimsy, joe-blow guy."

Some of them work in oil and gas, others in warehouses, though none have a background in law enforcement. "We come from all walks of life, but we all have one general thing in common: we don't like these fuckers," quips Raymond.

He's also wary of naïve copycats: "The last thing I need is some little kids going out and doing it themselves."

So, Raymond keeps a tight lid on his organization, making sure all the videos and chat logs are put in the hands of appropriate law enforcement officials. His site even includes a legal disclaimer: "All persons portrayed are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law," it reads. "We make no assertions of guilt and provide our viewers with content within the limits of Section 309 of the Criminal Code of Canada."

"Everything goes through me before it's published," he adds. "Even from my other teams, because I make sure it's good."

What law enforcement does with the evidence, Raymond says, isn't clear.

According to Calgary police, Raymond's public-shaming method can actually interfere with investigations. "If evidence is not collected or submitted to police properly, the suspect might not be charged or convicted," reads the police statement. "Without a charge or conviction, there is no record of the offence or court orders to prevent the suspect from having unsupervised contact with children in the future."

But canned statements like these don't seem to deter Raymond. In fact, he claims that most police unofficially support what he's doing. "I've talked to a lot of police. On the record, they're telling me I can't do it... off the record, they all say not to stop and keep going."

Raymond's motivation comes from a deep anger at the Canadian justice system's inaction on child predators. In his eyes, there aren't enough investigations to begin with, and there certainly aren't enough pedophiles in jail.

"They protect them by giving reduced sentences, like fucking two months—it's a joke," he says. "What I'm doing is making sure people know who the fuck these people are."

Risky or not, Raymond shows no signs of slowing down his cross-Canada mission to out pedophiles. "I started doing this and I'll die doing this."

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

John Doe was a freshman at George Mason University when he started seeing Jane Roe, a student at a different university (both subjects have been anonymous in media accounts and court documents). The two young people formed a relationship and frequently met at Doe's GMU dorm room to have BDSM sex, with Roe as the submissive partner. One day in October 2013, Roe pushed Doe away from her and then said she didn't know whether she wanted to continue, but he kept on anyway, he says because she didn't use their agreed-upon safe word

Later they broke up, but Doe continued texting Roe, trying to rekindle things and at one point threatening to kill himself if she didn't respond to his texts. Eventually, Roe reported the harassment to GMU and, separately, began working with the campus police to prove that he'd forced sex without her consent during the October incident. In December 2014, Doe was expelled from GMU for violating the university's sexual misconduct policy.

That's where things get complicated: Doe sued the university for violating his due process and free speech rights. This month, a district court in Virginia ruled in his favor, largely on procedural grounds. But Judge T.S. Ellis III pushed back on Doe's contention that GMU's code of conduct dismisses the complexities of BDSM relationships. The judge's decision read: "Plaintiff has no constitutionally protected and judicially enforceable fundamental liberty interest under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to engage in BDSM sexual activity."

The ruling has inspired outrage within the BDSM community, but for others, the case left a lot of unanswered questions: Didn't the Supreme Court rule in 2003 that sodomy laws are invalid? Do the same protections not apply to BDSM? Should people be worried about a clampdown on kink? I put these questions to UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, who has written about the case on his Washington Post blog, to understand what the ruling means for the rest of us.

VICE: So what happened here? Did the judge say that banning BDSM practices was OK?
Eugene Volokh: The student's claim was that the university was, in effect, making consensual BDSM a basis for expulsion. I don't think the university has a rule against consensual BDSM; I think the university has a rule against nonconsensual sex, and that its claim was that this was, in fact, nonconsensual. The issue is kind of hypothetical: What would happen if the university or some other government entity banned BDSM? There's no real reason to think that it did. But based on this hypothetical scenario—what if, as alleged, the university did ban it?—the court said, "Well, that would be constitutionally permissible."

Most people are probably aware of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case where the US Supreme Court that invalidated anti-sodomy laws across the country. Why wouldn't that apply here?
There are two ways of reading Lawrence v. Texas. One way of reading it is to say that a state may not ban sex in a context where it's essentially interfering with the ability of groups of people to have any realistic sexual self-expression. So the theory goes that what was wrong ? It seems like a lot depends on consent and expectations of consent.

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All photos by the author unless otherwise noted

Every year, over 400,000 Canadian students go deeper into student debt. Some provinces are better than others for giving grants over loans, but many Canadian students eventually have to bite the bullet and take on some form of increasing financial slavery. By the end of a four-year cycle, the average student will end up with at least $25,000 worth of tears for bill collectors to feast on.

Most money that students take for school is necessary to get by. Tuition, textbooks, living expenses—all of these things make up the bulk of what most young adults are borrowing for. But, let's be real, not all of it is spent wisely. There are a few of us (ie. many of us) who use our money on personal expenses not related to education at all. Dinners, booze, fast fashion, Ubers, and trips to Cuba. We chalk it up to psychological relief—this is the era of mental health after all.

To get an idea of what Canadian students were blowing their borrowed bucks on, I visited and called students from different programs and walks of life to hear about their most regrettable spending decisions.

JOON, MEDICAL SCIENCE, VANCOUVER

Photo via Joon

Notable purchases: expensive of Sennheiser headphones for anime ($350), expensive audio mixer for anime ($350), Steins;Gate 0—an anime video game ($65).

VICE: So you submitted your loan application late this year, and your parents are supplementing you until then. Do you feel bad spending your money on bullshit?
Joon: Not really. I never ask for the money, they just give it to me, and I already feel bad taking their money in any circumstance. My little sister cries and screams to get money from them, so my mom is always like, "Joon, you're such a good kid!" I guess it balances out.

OK. Sort of, I guess. Anything you almost ended up buying but held back to save your dignity?
Yeah, there was a video game I wanted to buy called Steins;Gate 0, but it's only for consoles that I don't have—PS4, PS3, Playstation Vita. I was literally about to buy a PS4 just to play this game, even though I knew I would probably never play it again. $400 down the drain. I eventually decided against it, but it was tough.

Do you think you're good with money?
I'm good at not going broke, but not necessarily saving it to be rich.

Total of student loan wasted: $500-1000 per month

Lauren, Radio and Television, Toronto

Notable purchases: a table from Honest Ed's ($30), assorted food ($50), a toaster ($35), a kettle ($30), a Vans hat to look like "one of those hot girls with backwards caps" ($40), a baby plant ($25).

VICE: Why did you buy all this normal stuff? Like, more power to you for saving money, but c'mon. Why didn't you buy some crazy shit?
Lauren: Well, it's just a bunch of shit that I see and think, "Oh, I'll need that!" And then I buy it, and sometimes I use it. A lot of the stuff here is just the essentials, though. I don't like to spend too much because I don't like having shit that I absolutely don't need. I'm not about clutter. I feel very crowded with my stuff; I need to get rid a lot of it. I hate owning things, it just stresses me out.

How do you feel about other people's spending habits?
Seeing other people splurge on ridiculous stuff with their student loans gives me anxiety. Like, you're spending so much money on stuff you're not going to ever need and going into debt because of it. Oh my god, I don't even want to talk about it.

You clearly value your food. What is important here?
Oh, oh! *pulls salt-and-vinegar popcorn seasoning off the shelf* I saw this at the grocery store a while ago, and I never tried it before. I put this on fucking everything, I swear.

Total of student loan wasted: roughly $200 per month

Syona, Fashion, Toronto

Notable purchases: an Adidas tracksuit ($150), a pair of Jordans ($200), liquor ($100/month), drunk spending she can't remember.

VICE: You're like the female Drake—tracksuit, Jordans, overall finesse. Do you spend a lot of your money on clothing?
Syona: Not a lot, but definitely some. I mean, it's kind of part of what I do in fashion—having an aesthetic and all that. Plus, sometimes I just go into the Jordan store and think, "Do I really need this pair? I already have a pair like this." I'm pretty good at saying no for that kind of thing.

How much money do you spend drinking?
Oh god. Uh, probably $100 on average a month? It fluctuates though. I'm probably much more of a lightweight than you, though.

Are you ever concerned about how much you spend partying?
Sometimes, but I think a lot of it works itself out because I'm happy at the end of the day. I'm sure I could save it, but I'm at a point in my life where it doesn't affect me too much and I don't really want to.

Total of student loan wasted: roughly $2,000 per semester

Josh, Business Management, Montreal

Notable purchases: a Gucci suit ($2,500), assorted Zara jackets ($600), a 2010 Ford pickup ($3,000)

VICE: I have a bias—I'm convinced business bros are the worst when it comes to buying douchey stuff. Please tell me you are the exception.
Josh: I bought a truck with my student loan and I didn't need it. Is that douchey?

Yeah, to be honest, it is. But at least you're self-aware. Do you feel like you have to spend more money to fit in with the suit-wearing business student crowd?
I haven't been in another program so I can't speak for things like arts or media, but business students party hard and like to look good while doing it. All of my boys wear suits when we go out. It's a mindset, you know? It's kind of preparing you for after school.

Why didn't you buy an Audi instead of a truck then!?
Well, business textbooks are expensive and the insurance on my truck is cheap.

Total of student loan wasted: roughly $6000 per semester

Kyla, Marine Biology, Calgary

Notable purchases: six science textbooks ($1,000), a MacBook Pro ($1,100), an e-reader ($150), school supplies ($100), four months of metro passes ($430), eats out five times a week ($240 per month)

VICE: You seem pretty responsible with your money. Does it upset you when other people spend their money on luxurious stuff instead of the necessities?
Kyla: No way! I'm not upset. I mean, people got this money given to them. They can do what they want with it. Everybody goes into debt and accepts that responsibility when they accept loans. The people, at least from what I find, who spend their loans on dumb stuff are people who already have money. My family doesn't have much so I just learned the value of money at a young age.

But surely you would buy extravagant stuff if you had money, no?
I don't know about extravagant stuff, but I wouldn't fuss over the small things. Being able to sit down and grab coffee, food, take a cab without having to worry about my bank account would be amazing.

You must have splurged on something by now. Don't be afraid—we've all done it.
Ugh, I bought a cake for a friend's birthday from Dairy Queen, and it was something like $70. A really nice ice cream cake. Problem was, when I got there, someone else had already bought him a cake and everyone agreed that it was the better cake. I had the receipt so I could have just returned it, but I decided to keep it and ended up eating it in one sitting. Real regrets.

Total of student loan wasted: About $1,000 per semester

Victoria, Broadcast, Toronto

Notable purchases: a Drake Degrassi T-shirt ($40), a pug pillow ($50), a can of Simpson's Duff root beer ($20), a Santa onesie ($100), a Darth Vader mask ($30), a 3D-printed sculpture of herself (free,with a ticket to Fan Expo), a Victoria's Secret bag (priceless: because her name is Victoria), furniture for her apartment ($300 every few months)

VICE: This stuff is very cheesy. Would you say you're a bit of a nerd?
Victoria: I just like to grab things that I think are funny or sentimental. All of these things mean something to me, but they don't mean that much. Some of them are also just very me—like the Santa onesie. It has some liquor stains on it.

Do you ever worry that you're not spending your money on the right things?
Not at all. I think these things enhance my life, and I've been really tight with not spending too much on textbooks or unnecessary binges. I like to think I have a good grip on my finances!

Alright, that Drake shirt is lit. Did he really look like that back in 2006?
Yeah, he changed a lot. He's really swole now.

Total of student loan wasted: About $2,000 per semester

Julie, Computer Science, Halifax

Notable purchases: a maxed-out Visa ($2,500), accumulated interest ($500)

VICE: Wait, so what'd you buy with the credit card?
Julie: I don't even remember at this point! It was all consumable stuff—tickets, drinks, food, cabs. I just got to a point where I didn't really want to look at the bill.

Isn't the interest on this card fucking crazy? What are you doing?
I need to wait for my next grant to pay it off. I wasn't really paying attention and got a little ahead of myself on the holiday break.

I'll keep you in my thoughts.

Total of student loan wasted: About $3,000 per semester.

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There was a mixed reaction from bystanders as the object slowly hovered back down to earth, kicking up small columns of dust as it landed. We were standing outside a health clinic in Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, watching the inaugural launch of a small white drone. Malawian officials said a prayer to bless its virgin flight, and issued assurances that it was not powered by witchcraft. Some spectators cheered; others, afraid the drone might land on them, took shade next to tall maize plants, shielding their heads.

"I'm glad I know what it is," said Scholastic Billiard, who like many of the other women gathered at the clinic, was pregnant. "I would have thought it was a bomb coming to be delivered, or the start of a war." Instead, the custom-made drone is part of a UNICEF pilot program to fly around and deliver HIV tests and results.

Malawi has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, with roughly 15 percent of adults carrying the virus. An estimated 170,000 children in the country are also HIV-positive, and young people between the ages of 15 and 18 account for half of new HIV infections. The death toll is tremendous—33,000 people in Malawi died of AIDS complications in 2014 alone, including 10,000 children, according to UNAIDS—in part because many people are undiagnosed or lack access to antiretroviral drugs.

"It's a good idea, as people will get their has beaten them all," she said.

But Dombolo also worries that the hovering machines could be met with superstition. In Malawi–a country where three-quarters of the population believes in witchcraft, and where those accused of the practice are aggressively prosecuted—a drone landing in someone's garden could easily be read as "witchcraft or something satanic," she said.

According to a September report from the Malawi News Agency, there was quite a stir in Kasangu after a man spotted an alleged "witchcraft plane" crashing outside a home in the early hours of the morning. The claim prompted debate over whether or not the object was proof of witchcraft, and hundreds of people gathered at local police stations hoping to glimpse the black tube with two sticks.

"They will have to know what is flying on top of them, as now they will have that fear," said Daniel Nyerenda, a health officer at another mother-and-child HIV clinic in Malawi. The clinic where he works treats more than 350 patients, up from just seven in 2010, he said, and some of his patients have stopped making the hours-long walk to the clinic to pick up their antiretroviral drugs—a problem that UNICEF's drone program could remedy.

Photo by UNICEF/Bodole

To dispel witchcraft rumors surrounding the new HIV drones, UNICEF has been carrying out drone awareness campaigns in Malawi. Jim O' Sullivan, a pilot-turned-drone technician who works for Matternet, the California-based company that created the specialty HIV-testing drones, says that in communities included in the public education campaign, the reaction has been "heartwarming."

"The kids love it," he said. "When they see the vehicle take off they will often times cheer. We haven't noticed any fear of it."

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The moment you realize you are on camera. Photo via RCMP

It was essentially a scene from the Trailer Park Boys.

Rachel Mae Furman in her home bar, Smoke & Honey. All photos by the author

There's no shortage of places to drink in Los Angeles: slick nightclubs filled with the Hollywood elite, dive bars populated by old men, Korean hostess lounges and karaoke bars... But there's a certain category of bar that's more special than the others. A type of bar so special, so elusive, that you have to be in-the-know to even find it: the kind of bar that's in someone's house.

The underground supper club rose to popularity years ago, with pop-up restaurants like Bistro LQ and Starry Kitchen operating out of peoples' homes. These intimate, exclusive places garnered lots of hype, and now the trend seems to have extended to a spattering of home bars, operating like ultra-secret speakeasies. There have been moving pop-ups, like London's Underground Drinking Club or New York's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which served drinks at various apartments, rooftops, and Hamptons homes (before eventually opening a brick and mortar bar). More permanent fixtures, like San Francisco's Worthybar, are run out of a private home.

In Los Angeles, there's Smoke & Honey, one of the city's finest whiskey bars, which just happens to operate in Rachel Mae Furman's Los Feliz apartment. Smoke & Honey looks more like an exclusive speakeasy than Los Angeles living room—the space is surrounded in padded leather and dark wood, there's a real bar, and a spattering of vintage items, like long candlesticks in silver holders and a wooden ship's wheel. Behind the bar, there's a shelving unit holding an impressive collection of limited-edition scotches and other spirits.

The professional bar set-up in Smoke & Honey

To say Furman is knowledgeable about liquor would be an understatement. She worked for years as a brand consultant for a major alcohol company, and now runs her own lifestyle blog and consulting service. She also keeps pre-mixed Negronis in her purse—solid credentials.

Furman built the bar about two and half years ago, viewing it as the ultimate fusion of her love of entertaining at home and drinking great booze. The night I visited, she expertly led guests in a tasting of several delicious and rare scotches, regaling us with stories of her visits to distilleries, and giving tasting notes of each dram. Because she doesn't charge anything for the drinks she serves, Smoke & Honey is mostly reserved for people Furman knows personally, and the tastings tend to focus on whatever she feels like pouring that day.

Guests sipping drinks in Smoke & Honey

Other home bars actively solicit newcomers—like El Tigre Magnifico, which regularly, and exuberantly, invites perfect strangers over to drink. Based out of a modest apartment in Glendale, El Tigre's two proprietors—roommates Cary Daniels and Matt Blackburn—use social media and word of mouth to entice and entertain people they've never met before. The night I attended, they had sent out a message on their Instagram account, telling prospective patrons to send them a poem. They received about 50 poems, varying wildly in both style and cogency, and from them selected seven lucky people to attend the evening's festivities.

Despite the fact that there is no actual "bar" at El Tigre, it felt like a professional operation. Daniels and Blackburn had printed a beautiful menu, and the several cocktails on offer were of the level of quality you would expect from a pricey craft establishment, despite being served inside someone's apartment. The kitchen counter and a small bar cart near it acted as the bar itself, and both were crammed with countless bottles, fresh herbs, fruits and juices, tinctures and shrubs, making it abundantly clear that El Tigre wasn't messing around.

A professional-grade cocktail... and the kitchen sink

In everyday life, Blackburn is an actual bartender, but he works at an establishment that doesn't allow him to experiment and innovate as much as he would like. Daniels is an audio-engineer by day, but clearly has a passion for cocktails and the craft thereof, and can hold his own when it comes to mixing a tasty beverage. Opening a home bar gave them an opportunity to experiment with drinks and pursue a cocktail-making passion that they couldn't in their professional lives.

What started over a year ago as two guys messing around and creating drinks for their pals—in return for a pizza, or a bottle of something—quickly turned into a massive event, where friends of friends packed into their place to get in on the party. They made a text list to communicate with people who wanted to come over, and at some points, they told me they were getting over 1,000 texts a day. It eventually ballooned to the point where someone, unbeknownst to them, made the bar a Yelp page and strangers started turning up in the afternoon, yelling, "Is this that bar?"

After that, they ditched the text list and started solely operating through Instagram. They also limited El Tigre's hours to a few nights a month.

The informal bar set-up in Cary Daniels' and Matt Blackburn's apartment

The duo are consummate hosts, Blackburn mixing drinks and Daniels taking orders from the guests. Both have a gift for entertaining and engaging the increasingly-drunk guests who gather around their dining room table to talk, laugh, and marvel at their well-made creations. When I visited, I found that the group in El Tigre had come together as strangers, but the vibe was very different than a bunch of people who don't know each other hanging out at an apartment party—soon, everyone was mingling and conversing like friends.

Like Smoke & Honey, El Tigre doesn't charge guests any money to drink, but there was a tip jar that we all lavished with increasing gratuity as the hour grew later.

Joseph Brooke's garage bar

If a night at El Tigre is like a party at your coolest friend's apartment, then The Barage, a home bar in Mid City, is more like visiting a man cave. Proprietor Joseph Brooke runs The Barage out of his garage (it's a garage bar—get it?), where he's created an enviable oasis of alcoholic diversion. His erstwhile carport combines the aesthetics of bar tools and power tools: There's a well-polished wood bar that he built by hand; bottles and bar hardware share wall space with axes, hammers, blades, a butterfly knife, brass knuckles, even a champagne saber, while a bandana-clad deer head serenely yet sagaciously gazes over the sets of vintage glassware.

Brooke, an affable, bearded new father, is quick with a joke and laugh. He's also a veteran barman, having spent 15 years in the industry "behind the stick," as it's called, having only recently left to take a brand ambassador position with a spirits company so he can spend more time with the family. His years of experience and honed expertise shine through in his creation, which he started building as soon as he purchased the house, around six years ago.

The bar itself is orderly, but The Barage as a whole still retains some of that dirt-under-the-fingernails, wrenching-on-the-Camaro-in-an-undershirt ruggedness, which only adds to its appeal. While Brooke and I shared beers, I admired his arcade game, dartboard, artfully hung string lights, and general up-by-the-bootstraps can-do attitude. I was the only guest at The Barage that night, but when Brooke does an event he goes big, packing the space and the generous lawn around it with dozens of guests.

Joseph Brooke's toolshed slash bar set-up

For many, "going out" is where all the fun happens, whereas "staying in" has anti-social, sometimes even depressive connotations. Nothing subverts that tired and inaccurate paradigm quite like a gloriously stocked home bar. A great domestic drinking den elevates the experience of boozing at home—you're not just cracking a beer on the porch or mixing a gin and tonic in the kitchen, but creating an experience.

So I raise a glass to all those enterprising souls who have built and bellied-up to their own little corners of paradise, and I say loudly, clearly, and without jest: Please invite me over.

Follow Karl Hess on Twitter.

A selection of SNAP benefit cards from a variety of states. Photo via the US Department of Agriculture Flickr

Two years ago, Barack Obama signed the latest "Farm Bill," a piece of legislation that is generally renewed every five years and funds a bevy of food- and agriculture-related government programs. The 2014 version was subject to a brutal legislative fight, and in the end, conservatives in Congress were able to get $8.7 billion in cuts to food stamps written into it.

Now some of the consequences of those cuts are coming into effect: By some estimates, upward of a million Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 are set to lose their food stamps in 2016.

The people who are bearing the brunt of the budget cuts are known as ABAWDs: able-bodied adults without dependents. If you're young, childless, and rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—more commonly known as food stamps—you're probably an ABAWD.

The category was created in 1996; the idea is that young people who don't have to worry about children or disabilities shouldn't need government assistance to survive. Generally, these Americans aren't allowed to be on SNAP for more than three years in three months, but when the economy collapsed in 2008 this restriction fell by the wayside. But now that the economy is doing better by some metrics (even if more Americans are living in poverty now than in 2008), the government evidently thinks that these individuals should be working 20 hours a week, and if they're not, they need to be trying harder to find a job.

Last year, the federal government informed the states that they should be tracking ABAWDs closely and making sure they aren't going past that three-month limit. States with persistently high unemployment can still qualify for waivers, but a few states—mostly those controlled by Republicans—are adopting restrictions on food stamps even though the federal government isn't forcing them too. In total, 40 states will have some sort of time limit on SNAP benefits in place this year, 23 for the first time since the Great Recession.

In New York State, there are over 50,000 people slated to be kicked off SNAP for three years on April 1. Several of that state's counties—including four of the five boroughs in New York City—are on waivers. But Manhattan is not, thanks to the island's wealth, and those struggling with that borough's high rent will be squeezed even further if they lose their benefits. As Margarette Purvis, the President of the Food Bank of New York City, told me, "To deny people's food based on what your neighbors make shouldn't apply here."

Purvis says that the Food Bank—the largest organization of its kind in the country—serves about 123 free meals every minute to hungry New Yorkers. But with the cuts in place, she added, her organization will have to provide the equivalent of 31 million more meals over the course of this year.

"When Congress passed this bill, lawmakers said that these individuals could come to food banks or pantries if they're hungry," she told me. "But I checked my spam folder and I didn't see any email from Washington saying they were giving us more money to do that."

Purvis, a frequent critic of the cuts, said that the food banks her organization works with are already at capacity, as homelessness and hunger problems continue to exasperate New York City's lawmakers.

ABAWDs may seem to some lawmakers like people who shouldn't be on government benefits, but the young people on SNAP likely don't have any other resources. "They do not have Medicaid, and most welfare programs are for families," said Ed Bolen, an expert on food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank that studies welfare. "SNAP is their lifeline, and now they're basically out of luck."

"If you're paying your rent, then that loss of $150 a month to feed yourself is destructive," he went on. "Whether it's your housing, or if your car breaks down, it really pulls the rug out. The trip to the food banks multiple times a month they'll need to do to replace their supply... You can't find a job if you're hungry."

The young have been hard hit by years of stagnant wages and the Great Recession; one 2014 study found that after six months of job searching, 16 percent of Millennials were still unemployed. Bolen argues that Congress should instead look at job search diligence as a factor—as in, how hard you're trying—rather than merely looking at how many hours a week ABAWDs work.

Bolen also thinks that states and municipalities should offer programs that can hire or professionally prepare those who are facing these inevitable cuts. New York already has a work-share program, where companies cut back on workers' hours and pay and the state supplements their wages. Most states, however, don't have anything like that in place.

"You can't cut off first, and then there's just nothing there," Bolen said. "That's why people are getting so worked up about this."

On the 2016 campaign trail, most of the Republican candidates for the White House have called for or voted for more harsh work requirements for those on welfare programs, reiterating their party's traditional disdain for government benefits. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton criticized the 2014 Farm Bill when it was signed into law, while Bernie Sanders even voted against her husband's welfare reform legislation 20 years ago.

But for the most part, the fact that about a million Americans have lost, or are about to lose, their food stamps has gone by largely unnoticed—an unfortunate consequence of an extremely loud election cycle that doesn't seem to be quieting down anytime soon.

"What's about to befell this country is a big deal," Purvis told me, clearly frustrated. "It's saying to people, 'If you don't have a job, you can't have food.'"

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It's late morning on a quiet, sunny neighborhood block of Hawthorne, California. The quaint suburban scene of mid-size houses and neatly manicured lawns is punctured only by the telltale signs of a Hollywood film shoot: massive trucks filled with cables, video monitors set up under tents, and a robust crew hustling on and off set.

The shoot is for a scene on the pilot episode of a new A+E show called The Infamous, set in 1990s Los Angeles, and staged outside an old police station, where a crowd of angry protesters are confronting a line of uniformed cops. Darting in and out of the action is Chic Daniel, a retired LAPD detective and the "godfather" of Hollywood technical consulting—although he's too modest to ever actually describe himself like that, according to line producer Peter Feldman."I was around for Rodney King, I was around for OJ Simpson...so this is very familiar in my memory bank of how to deal with these circumstances," Daniel tells VICE. "Having actually been there during this period of time is a big advantage." The low key ex-cop prefers to describe himself as a "go-between" for law enforcement and Hollywood, and while he refuses to boast about his career, his resume does that for him. For almost three decades, Daniel has worked in the entertainment industry, guiding writers and actors on how to paint an authentic picture of law enforcement—from the proper way to handcuff a suspect to the protocol for searching a home. Along the way, he and other current and former cops have helped shape America's perception of police—a gig that has taken on new meaning at a time of heightened national scrutiny of law enforcement.

In this case, Daniel is schooling actors on the in-and-outs of crowd control, explaining that real cops try to maintain civility in the midst of a chaotic protest, and only engage if demonstrators become physically violent.

"As a police officer you have to get used to being in circumstances where people are yelling at you," Daniel says.

For almost a decade, Daniel was working for the LAPD while also moonlighting as an actor on film and TV productions. In 1998, after 26 years with the police department that included a stay in the prestigious SWAT unit, he retired and took on technical consulting for Hollywood full-time. He's worked on more than 40 films and TV shows, he says, including roles on recent banner projects like The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story and the 2015 NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton.

In Hollywood, according to Daniel, nothing goes according to plan. Conditions can change in an instant and the cast of characters is constantly changing.

"To me, it's a lot like police work," he muses. "Every day is completely different."

Retired LAPD Detective Chic Daniel, right, on set. All photos by David Austin

Daniel's worked with some of the biggest stars in the business, and on-location productions have allowed him to travel widely. But he's also been the lynchpin to helping writers and creators mold the portrayal of police in pop culture. By helping create what he believes to be legit cop characters and scenarios, Daniel has the chance to show police in a positive light—which some officers argue is vanishingly rare in contemporary news media.

"I think most people's opinion of law enforcement and other segments of society are formed by the things you read and what you see," Daniel says. "So if you're constantly being bombarded with negative images of police officers in a shooting or whatever the circumstances, you start forming this opinion that every police officer does it like that."

In reality, though, "bad shootings" are a very small percentage of police activity, Daniel insists—and often the result of good intentions gone awry. (Some Black Lives Matter protesters and even presidential candidates might disagree.) As a technical advisor on the TV series Southland, which foregrounds the lives of fictional LAPD cops, Daniel was able to help writers shape characters who make mistakes, but often in the process and belief they were doing the right thing, he says.

Over the years, he's compiled a roster of nearly 200 police officers, sheriff's deputies, parole officers and other law enforcement personnel he can call on for background work or consulting assistance. Many of the officers are even members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Daniel explains, so when a role opens up for a cop character with a handful of lines, he'll refer one of his crew to the casting director.

When actors play cops, wardrobe has to fit them for a costume, props have to give them the proper equipment, and Daniel has to train them on everything from how to stand (typically with their hands on their belt), to how to lace up their shoes.

"They come with their uniforms on, they're ready to go. All they have to do is give them a prop gun and a prop badge and they're ready to work," he says.

So when Michael Mann was looking for a cop to play a small part in the 2004 Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx mystery-thriller Collateral, Daniel suggested seasoned LAPD Officer Bob Deamer. The gregarious, Massachusetts-born cop ended up scoring quite a few lines in the film—and even gets to tussle with Foxx on screen. (Deamer and Daniel first met years back when they were both working on the TV series Robbery Homicide Division.)

Although Deamer now only works on a few projects per year (he doesn't have an agent or actively seek out gigs), he does like to think he uses the whiff of celebrity for good. The cop runs arts-based youth programs in the South LA community where he's stationed, and says even his brief appearances in films like Straight Outta Compton have won him influence with kids and teens.

Of course, the experienced cop doesn't exactly mind being part of the moviemaking process, and he's never short on a war story or personal anecdote to share with writers. "If they like one of your stories, they memorialize it in the film," Deamer says. "That's pretty cool to be part of an art piece in a sense."

And some active-duty LA police officers have nearly taken on second careers as actors. LAPD Detective Jamie McBride's rolodex reads nothing like that of a typical cop—the man describes regularly fielding calls from blockbuster director Michael Bay, kicking it with infamous Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and bonding with actor Michael Peña at a resort in Mexico when they were both shooting Babel.

A 25-year veteran of the LAPD who currently serves as director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents officers up until the rank of lieutenant, McBride's been acting and advising on sets since 2002.

"I either play a cop or a killer...because I have a shaved head and a goatee," he says.

LAPD Detective Jamie McBride at his office

Since then, he's cobbled together a serious resume of experiences, including working under Oscar-winning director Alejandro Iñárritu and scoring a role in Michael Bay's Transformers.

"I'm a hack who just gets lucky," he jokes. "A lot of times I have auditions and I have to cancel them for police work."

McBride has even gone so far as to dabble in stunt work. In addition to a few episodes on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., McBride took the wheel of a police cruiser in the TV movie Sucker Free City at the behest of Spike Lee. The director asked him to drive during a chase scene and to get the car as close to the camera as possible, McBride recalls.

"So I'm driving like a bat out of hell, I'm beating the shit of this car," he says.

Racing through San Francisco at 65 miles an hour with his siren flashing at every turn, McBride remembers rounding the corner where Lee and other crew were standing just as his cruiser began to wildly fishtail.

"For a minute there I thought I was going to wipe out Spike Lee and everyone else," he says.

While some cops catch "the acting bug" after just a few gigs and even quit the LAPD to pursue it, McBride says he's "realistic" about the second career and that acting is merely a hobby to help pad his pension post retirement.

With the industry's lucrative standards, the scene is a cushy one, as McBride once made more than $10,000 in just a few days of overtime shoots. Like many pro actors, though, he aspires to write his own stuff, too; the cop has already written a treatment for a TV series, loosely based on a plainclothes detail he worked tracking down "violent suspects." It's currently circulating between studios.

Throughout his years in film, McBride has befriended not just celebrities but many struggling actors who, even a decade later, continue to bartend and work side jobs to make ends meet. Which makes this cop think the dream of moving to LA and becoming a movie star—or even an actor who earns a livable wage—is just that: a farce.

"That's a movie," McBride says. "That's not real life."

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Obama's selection for Supreme Court judge has been rejected by Republicans. Photo of Obama in 2009 via Wikimedia.

US News

Republicans Refuse Obama's Supreme Court Pick
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans have vowed to refuse President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Obama hopes Republicans will eventually find it difficult to refuse a moderate judge like Garland when faced with the prospect of a Clinton or Trump presidency.—The New York Times

Alleged Gunman Sues Uber for $10 Million
The accused gunman charged with fatally shooting six people in Michigan last month has filed a $10 million civil rights lawsuit against Uber. Jason Dalton's handwritten complaint blames the company for creating a "hostile workplace environment," claiming he was controlled by the app. —ABC News

Michigan Governor Testifies on Flint Crisis
Congress will question Michigan Governor Rick Snyder this morning about what exactly he knew of high levels of lead in Flint's water supply. EPA boss Gina McCarthy also goes before the US House Oversight Committee and is expected to place the blame on the state. —Detroit Free Press

DC Metro Shutdown Reveals Severe Damage
Safety checks during Washington DC's 24-hour shutdown of the Metrorail system revealed severe cable damage in three different places. Had Metro officials been aware of the damage, trains would have been immediately stopped. Wednesday's shutdown was prompted by a tunnel fire Monday. —The Washington Post

International News

TAK Group Admits to Ankara Bombing
The Kurdish militant group TAK has claimed responsibility for Sunday's suicide attack in the Turkish capital Ankara, which killed 37 people. The group claimed the car bombing was "vengeful action" for security operations in the southeast that have seen hundreds of Kurdish civilians killed. —The Guardian

Brazilians Protest as Former President Lula Gets Immunity
Thousands of Brazilians protested outside the Presidential Palace Wednesday night after President Dilma Rousseff appointed her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva her new chief of staff. The move protects Lula from prosecution by a judge investigating the corruption scandal at state oil company, Petrobras. —BBC News

Hostage Video Shows Missing Japanese Journalist
A video has surfaced online that appears to show a missing Japanese journalist, reportedly held by the al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front in Syria, reading a message to his family. Jumpei Yasuda confirms he is still alive by saying, "Today is my birthday, March 16." —The Japan Times

Palestinian Pilgrims Killed in Bus Crash
At least 14 Palestinians have died and 36 were injured when their bus overturned in southern Jordan near the Saudi Arabia border. The passengers, from the occupied West Bank, were headed to Mecca to perform the Umra rituals.—Al Jazeera

Hillary Clinton on Broad City. Photo via Broad City's Twitter.

Everything Else

Trump in Top Ten Global Risks
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a Donald Trump presidency is one of the top ten risks facing Planet Earth. The research firm has warned Trump could disrupt the global economy and heighten security threats. —The Hill

Clinton Makes Guest Appearance on Broad City
In a bid to reach out to millennials, Hillary Clinton makes a guest appearance on tonight's episode of Broad City. Ilana meets Clinton at her Brooklyn campaign headquarters and promises to to tweet out, "Vote for Hillary. Yas, yas, yas." —The Daily Beast

Loud Sex is Good for Your Health
Sweden's Health Minister Gabriel Wikstrom has said having loud sex is good for well-being and for public health. Sex experts agree. "Being able to vocalize adds to the pleasure," says psychotherapist Dr. Ian Kerner. —Broadly

Construction Worker Starts Pedophile-Hunting Network
Dawson Raymond, a Calgary-based construction worker, has started a network of "creep catchers" who want to expose pedophiles in cities across Canada. But police say the vigilantes are putting investigations at risk.—VICE



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This article originally appeared in The Trace.

Earlier this month, when Mitt Romney called Donald Trump a "phony" and a "fraud," he was expressing the point of view of the Republican Elite, who had for the last six months been working haphazardly to torpedo the real estate mogul's White House campaign. A Trump nomination, they agreed, would be the GOP's Chernobyl, decimating the party in this November's election and rendering it radioactive to broad swaths of the electorate for many cycles to come.

The frontal attack by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee marked the most prominent sortie yet in an anti-insurgency effort building in desperate intensity. This fall, two GOP campaign veterans, Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, tried to create a super PAC that would focus exclusively on defeating Trump, as reported by the New York Times. In January, the National Review, a leading intellectual outlet for the conservative movement, devoted an entire issue to attacking the candidate, calling him "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist." Last month, at a DC luncheon for Republican governors and benefactors, top GOP strategist Karl Rove tried to rally the audience to mount a last-ditch push to halt the Trump juggernaut.

Amid the anti-Trump backlash from the right, gun advocates have their own, specific grievances. "He has no principles when it comes to the gun issue," Tim Miller, the former communications director of Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, told The Trace. "He's criticized Republicans for being too beholden to the NRA . And there's no reason to believe, if it benefited his own interests, that he wouldn't completely flip on those who value Second Amendment rights."

Bob Owens, who runs the influential pro-firearm website Bearing Arms, has claimed the candidate "will be the death of the Second Amendment." A similar site, The Truth About Guns, has asked if Trump is an "anti-gun rights dictator."

And here's Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America (GOA), a no-compromise organization that has given its 2016 endorsement to Texas Senator Ted Cruz: "Trump is not at all satisfactory. He's not consistent. Sometimes he's conservative, and sometimes he's not."

The Stop Trump movement is an unprecedented inversion of the political process. Normally, Republican elites and conservative kingmakers coalesce around a runaway leader in a presidential primary. Now they are doing the opposite, marshaling some of the best resources at their disposal to upend the reality TV star's candidacy.

Given the NRA's participation in past conservative coalitions (such as those arrayed against President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominees), and given the doubts about Trump's fealty to gun rights, there would seem to have been an important role for the gun group to play in the anti-Trump effort, had it been interested in having one. The organization, after all, is known for its ability to turn out passionate single-issue voters. In the past, it has given candidates an edge in states that lined up with crucial dates on the Republican primary calendar in 2016. But its voice remained conspicuously absent from the conservative chorus calling for Trump's defeat.

The explanation for the NRA's decision not to jump into the fray begins—but does not end—with its strict policy of not involving itself in presidential primary elections. "The NRA has to stay out of it," said David Keene, a former president of the NRA who has voiced personal concerns about Trump's candidacy. "Unlike other groups, we don't play those games."

When the NRA has veered from that practice, it's been in down-ballot primary elections involving unique circumstances. In 2012, for instance, it came out against Richard Lugar, a powerful moderate Republican whose voting record on guns during his run as Indiana's longest-serving Senator earned him an F-rating from the NRA. Lugar wound up losing the primary to Indiana's arch-conservative state treasurer, Richard Mourdock—and as influential Republicans feared, the party wound up losing the seat to Democrats.

Two years later, the NRA showed that it's equally willing to protect an establishment favorite, at least when its own place in the conservative firmament is being challenged. In a 2014 House primary, the group endorsed Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader from Virginia who was facing a Tea Party challenge from a largely unknown conservative named David Brat. The latter had the support of the National Association for Gun Rights, an NRA rival that, like GOA, stood far to its right. Brat won the primary in a major upset.

"We endorsed Cantor because he had supported a number of NRA proposals and positions," Keene said. "And we went against Lugar because he was perhaps one of the most anti-gun lawmakers in the Senate."

Keene added, "The NRA has never required perfection, but it does expect candidates to be with them on major issues. If you had someone up there saying, 'I oppose the Second Amendment,' then that would be a reason to oppose that candidate in a primary."

As Cruz has noted, a candidate in this year's Republican presidential primary would have to be "clinically insane" to take such a stance, which would seem to settle matter. But a deeper look at the record shows that the NRA can find other reasons to give or withhold its support from an otherwise simpatico candidate. In 2003, Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, ran for governor in Mississippi. According to Keene, Barbour was "a personal friend of almost the entire NRA leadership." But in the general election, the organization endorsed Ronnie Musgrove, the Democratic incumbent with an A-rating from the NRA. Barbour, meanwhile, had said all the right things, but had never had those positions tested by actual legislation crossing his desk.

" had a record, as governor, of supporting gun rights," Keene explained. "Haley didn't have a record yet."

Trump also lacks a legislative history. That could have been an opening for the NRA, had it wanted to wade into the primary fight. After Trump's rout in New Hampshire erased any doubts about the potency of his message, there remained plenty of Republican contenders—Bush, Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich—who had earned both the favor of the establishment and top marks for their pro-gun voting records.

Even after Bush tanked in South Carolina, the NRA had an opening. On March 1, Super Tuesday (Part I), voters went to the polls in states where the NRA had allegedly helped topple candidates in the past. In Tennessee, the group supposedly steered voters away from Al Gore in 2000, causing the Democratic presidential candidate to lose his home state in the general election. It did the same in Arkansas in 2014 to Democrat Mark Pryor, a veteran Senator and loyal pro-gun vote who lost his seat to a virtually unknown congressman named Tom Cotton. Virginia, where Rubio had his best runner-up finish, is literally the NRA's backyard. In Georgia, the gun lobby has also been known to get its way. If those states hadn't gone for Trump, the whole nominating contest might look very different now.

"The NRA has to stay out of it," said David Keene, a former president of the NRA who has voiced personal concerns about Trump's candidacy. "Unlike other groups, we don't play those games."

And here we arrive at the next, decisive node in our thought experiment. If the NRA had opted to make an endorsement in this historic Republican primary, who would have had the strongest case for its blessing? The answer, as far we know, is that no clear choice would have existed. With the politics of guns now aligned cleanly on partisan divides, this year's GOP field—like most national Republican candidates these days—have so completely absorbed the NRA's platform that the gun lobby's ability to influence a close primary have been diminished. "If one gets endorsed, the others who have the same record will want to know why they weren't," Keene explained.

Once the Republican presidential nominee is selected, the NRA has always fallen behind him. In 2008, after John McCain won the nomination, the group endorsed the Arizona senator, even though he only had a B-rating. In 2012, it backed Romney, despite an early gaffe in which he awkwardly recalled his happy memories of hunting "small varmints."

Trump, for his part, has positioned himself as a vocal advocate for gun rights, stating that he'll abolish gun-free zones on his first day in office. He was a featured speaker at the NRA's Leadership Forum in 2015, and is slated to speak at the event again in May.

"The unfortunate thing," Keene said, "is you can't tell how someone will act as president until they're sworn in. Recently, this guy from Alaska called and said, 'Trump's gonna sell us out. We need to do something.'

"I asked, 'What's your evidence?' We can't read people's hearts and minds."

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A sauna—but not the sauna featured in this article. Photo via Flickr user Kent Wang

This article originally appeared on VICE France

A while ago, I saw one of our regulars in action. I knew she enjoys gang bangs, but this time, she was even more adventurous than usual. It's difficult for me to describe the scene exactly. But let's say I was facing a line of guys queueing up, waiting to have sex with her. She loves having something written above her bum, things like "fill this" or "needy hole." According to her, it stimulates "the stallions" riding her. If that's what she likes, that's what she likes. It's my job to accommodate her with having any kind of debauchery she'd like to engage in.

I work in a sex sauna in Paris. I welcome the clients and make them feel comfortable. I choose the music we play in the background, I prepare coffee or tea, I make sure the towels are washed and that the sauna in general is tidy and clean—which is by far the least sexy part of my job.

I heard about the job from a friend that also works in the sauna, and mostly wanted it because I felt like getting out of my comfort zone—like exploring an unfamiliar world.

In the sauna we see people of all ages—although no one is under 18, of course. It's a very diverse mix of all social classes, religions, and backgrounds. Some people just come to the sauna to relax but most of them come to have sex, watch people having sex, parade around naked, jerk off, or be jerked off.

But some of the clients are a bit creepier. There are some very needy guys who've been on a very long dry spell and aren't afraid to show it. I've met some shady, weird, crazy guys during my time at the sauna; guys who believe everything is allowed, even though the place only works because everyone follows the rules.

The first rule of our sauna is to respect others—which is basically the first rule of human interaction in general. The other rules are just as basic: learn to accept rejection, always ask before touching, and, above all, never cross any line indicated by the women in the sauna or their partners. Showering is mandatory for obvious, hygienic reasons. And lastly, it's forbidden to do anything more than just touching in the jacuzzi. You can't have a hard on in there, and you can't ever come in the jacuzzi either. Men have to be naked in the sauna, while women can choose to wear some kind of sexy outfit, if they feel like it. We hand out condoms for elementary safety reasons, and some lube for those who like it.

I've seen a lady being gang-banged, while her husband checked with a flashlight if the guys who were having sex with his wife were wearing a condom.

After they've come in, the men wait for the women to arrive; they drink tea and sweat it out in the saunas, or they jerk off to the porn that's always played on TV screens throughout the building. Only the regulars talk to each other, the others talk to me. Most clients have a chat for a couple of minutes before moving on to massaging each other, before moving on to fucking.

The competition in the sauna is extremely fierce—there are about ten men to every woman. Luckily, most of these women enjoy gang bangs and being watched, so it's never really a problem.

I'm a woman, which means I have to deal with tons of annoying men hitting on me too; telling me their life's story or rambling on about their achievements while trying to sound like they're not horny. Some of them smell terribly. Or they don't respect the rules; they go to the cabins and leave their used condoms or their tissues behind, even though there are trash cans everywhere. I divide the clients in two distinct categories—there are the respectful regulars, and then there are all the rest.

There are recurring S&M parties, so clients can discover that world. But my boss also organizes traditional masked balls and Caribbean themed zouk parties. He does it to cater to our diverse clientele and everybody comes to them—from total strangers to French celebrities.

I've witnessed so many incredible and sometimes sinister scenes. I've seen a lady well into her sixties being gang-banged while next to her a woman forty years younger was sensually dancing, naked, with the sole purpose to get the onlooking guys excited. All of that was happening while the husband of the elderly lady checked with a flashlight if the guys who were having sex with his wife were wearing a condom.

I also discovered so many new things that I could never have imagined myself. I've seen a man wearing a kind of locked G-string—like a chastity belt. His wife had made him wear it because he had gone on a business trip for a week. That was one of the most perverse cases of domination I've seen. But it apparently worked, because the guy still ended up in the sauna, but couldn't take the chastity belt off.

I also remember a curvy woman in her forties wearing a nightgown and parading around in the sauna. She was followed by a flock of clearly, very horny guys. When she had gone full circle through the sauna she told them: "You, yes. You, no." She chose a couple of them and had a threesome in one of the cabins.

Another sauna, but not the one this article is about. Photo via Flickr user BCC Leisure Centres

What happens most in our sauna is candaulism, where a woman fucks other men, while her husband is watching. You could call that very free spirited, but there are some tacit rules to it: A woman can't have an orgasm with the other men—she can only come if her husband has an orgasm at the same time as her.

I was never the picture of female modesty but since I started working at the sauna, I'm slowly getting more and more out of control. I'm bordering on exhibitionism. I went to another sauna once and ended up giving a blow job to a guy while other guys were jerking off around us. When I realized that was happening, I immediately asked them to get out—which they did, without any protest.

Being permanently exposed to sex hasn't influenced my libido but it did change my perception of sex. Since I'm constantly around people who like to experiment and take their sex life a little further, I now actively look for new sexual experiences myself.

I have at times had the inclination to do something with a client, but my contract clearly states that I cannot. I remember meeting an extremely beautiful guy in the sauna once, and I asked him if he'd like to meet in another sauna later. I'd never ask him for a drink: Seeing someone naked is radically different from getting to know each other over a drink. All we both wanted was to fuck.

I've met very interesting and sexually liberated people through this job. Most of them are around 40 and express their sexuality without any inhibitions. I think our generation voluntarily creates many sexual barriers—especially women. I know some women who I think would feel a lot better off if they visited the sauna once or twice. Nothing weird would have to happen: These days, when I go to the sauna after work, the clients are very respectful and don't hit on me. Of course, they don't mind watching me when I take a shower but that's about it.